Why China can’t get enough of African donkeys

Sear up the Chinese food delivery app Meituan for ejiaoand all kinds of delicacies appear. Ejiao was once a luxury consumed at the emperor’s court and prized as a traditional remedy to strengthen the blood, improve sleep and slow aging. Today, ejiao is for the masses. People drink it in a tonic that costs about $2 for 10 bottles; eat it in small cakes made with rock sugar, rice wine, walnuts and black sesame for $7 for a can of 30; or a snack ejiao-coated dates for just under a dollar a pack.

There’s just one problem: the collagen substance is extracted from donkey hides. China’s domestic donkey population has fallen dramatically, and now the country’s mass taste is depriving African farms of one of their most vital and valuable assets. In far-flung countries like Nigeria, Ethiopia and Botswana, animals that are the mainstay of many small farms – where donkeys are used for ploughing, taking crops to market and many other purposes – are instead slaughtered for the cash value of their skins.

The runoff has become so damaging to Africa’s rural economy that the 55-member African Union approved a continent-wide ban on the slaughter of donkeys for their skin at the summit of heads of states in February. Whether Africa’s governments can implement such a ban remains to be seen. If they do, they could cause serious problems for the Chinese ejiao industry.

China’s rulers have done nothing to address the problem. At first glance, their inaction is baffling. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has spent enormous sums of political and financial capital to woo developing world countries, especially in Africa. Given that context, it is wise to intervene to address the ejiao trade and helping preserve the African donkey seems like an easy, cheap way to prove China’s willingness to be a constructive partner.

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“Leadership brings responsibility,” Oscar Meywa Otele, a political scientist at the University of Nairobi, told me. African countries would like to see China “play a more meaningful and acceptable role,” but the donkey issue is a big enough problem to “undermine China’s ambitions to be the leader of the Global South.”

Xi’s grand objectives may conflict with China’s short-term economic and political interests. When this happens, it opens a window into Beijing’s true attitude toward its perceived partners and calls into question China’s willingness to assume that leadership. That matters in Washington. As developing countries become a battleground between the United States and China, with both eager to recruit supporters to their competing visions of a reformed world order, the contradictions in Xi’s approach could damage his efforts to portray Beijing as more sympathetic to its interests and needs of the world order. of poor countries. The simple donkey has thus acquired a geopolitical meaning.

china’s consumption by ejiao has increased with the wealth of the country. Back in 1990, ejiao makers in China needed about 200,000 donkey skins annually. It is now believed that they consume approximately 4 to 6 million skins per year. That amounts to about 10 percent of the world’s estimated donkey population of 53 million people – an extinction rate that is clearly unsustainable. The question of ejiao Producers exceeded domestic supply years ago, sparking brisk import activity.

Exactly how many skins come from Africa is unclear, but the continent is home to two-thirds of the world’s donkeys, so it’s safe to assume that African exports account for a large portion. Because donkeys reproduce slowly (a jennet usually only produces a foal every two years), the drainage is quickly depleting the African herd. One study shows that South Africa’s donkey population has declined from 210,000 animals in 1996 to 146,000 in 2019. On current trends, the donkey could disappear completely from the continent within the next twenty years. Furthermore, the rising value of pelts has encouraged the illegal slaughter of donkeys, the circumvention of legal controls and the widespread theft of donkeys from poor farmers.

Beijing could do a lot to alleviate the problem. Better regulation of the donkey skin trade could help African governments monitor and control exports, as well as ensure a more sustainable supply for the Chinese economy. ejiao producers. Why Beijing hasn’t bothered to respond is a matter of speculation. One factor could be the government’s eagerness to promote traditional medicine, at home and abroad, as a way to showcase China’s ancient science and civilization; in that respect, it may regard any restriction of industry as contrary to the national interest. Or perhaps the welfare of the donkeys and the plight of Africa’s farmers is simply below Beijing’s threshold for attention, compared to more pressing geopolitical concerns.

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China’s abusive donkey trade is part of a broader pattern of Chinese exploitation of the resources of the Global South. Chinese fleets have long been accused of aggressive overfishing, from the West African coast to the South Pacific. In the South China Sea, most of which Beijing claims as territorial waters, Chinese ships are keeping fishermen from neighboring countries from traditional fishing grounds, a major point of contention among governments in the region.

china’s commercial interests are also at odds with Beijing’s attempts to promote itself as a champion of the world’s poorest countries. Lending by state-owned banks, much of it in support of Xi’s global infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative, is being touted as a sustainable development program and evidence of China’s superiority as an economic partner. But these loans, which have made China the world’s largest official creditor to developing countries, have contributed to a debt crisis in the global South as some low-income countries have become overburdened and unable to make repayments.

Yet Beijing has shown little sympathy for its debtors, and state banks have put pressure on poor countries. They have resisted writing off part of the loan’s principal – a common practice in debt restructuring aimed at hastening a return to solvency – and typically insist on secret deals to make other to beat creditors with what is left in the depleted treasuries of the debtor countries. For example, when Angola had to restructure a $15 billion loan from China in 2020, the state-owned China Development Bank first started paying itself interest from a mandatory escrow account. Then, anticipating the depletion of that resource, the bank demanded that the cash-strapped government replenish it.

Developing countries are “getting to know China in a different role,” Bradley Parks, executive director of the AidData research lab at William & Mary, told me. Less because of its generosity, and more “as the world’s largest debt collector.” And he added: “Debtors don’t win many popularity contests.”

At the same time, new loans from Beijing have all but dried up over the past five years. As a result, the flow of money that once flowed from China to the global South has reversed. A 2023 study on China’s lending program published by the American Economic Association found that developing countries now pay more to Chinese banks to service their debts than they receive in new loans.

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cChinese leaders approximation developing countries’ debt “is in direct tension with their desire to enjoy influence with the general public and with the governing elites in the developing world,” Parks said. In this quest for influence, Chinese leaders have taken pains to portray themselves as selfless partners, interested in global well-being, in contrast to the West. “In promoting its own development process, China always insists on mutual support with the countries of the South, complementing each other’s strengths and jointly building a modernized Global South,” reiterated Liu Jianchao, the influential head of the International Department of the Communist Party, recently. in a top ideological magazine.

Yet the reality is that China’s rise poses as many risks as benefits for emerging economies. Xi still seems to believe he can lead the emerging voices of the global South in a struggle against their former colonial masters in the West. But China’s actual policies toward developing countries are beginning to reflect that old colonialism: the exploitation of resources for the benefit of the center, the self-image of the metropole that grants special rights to its superior civilization, the use of capital to extract more wealth from the less fortunate. .

“It is African governments that need to be much more proactive. You cannot afford to let China dictate you,” Sanusha Naidu, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Global Dialogue, a South Africa-based think tank, told me. “That was the big challenge, the difficulty, in this relationship.”

The African Union’s donkey ban is a sign that the continent’s leaders are deciding to act in a more proactive manner. Implicit in the ban is a strong message that China cannot get everything it wants, on its own terms, from the global South. If the African Union succeeds in halting the trade in donkey skins to China, Beijing will no longer be able to pretend that its actions have no adverse effect on African countries or its reputation on the continent. The ejiao The industry is already damaging China-Africa relations, Lauren Johnston, a China expert at the University of Sydney, told me. “It makes people hate China.”